


Thousands of lives and all of them are ours

by Starswirl



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, Past Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:07:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23754340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starswirl/pseuds/Starswirl
Summary: A look at the past lives of the Gaang, and the things that are constant throughout them.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 72





	Thousands of lives and all of them are ours

**Author's Note:**

> I'm always meaning to write fic and this came out of me all in one go.

The Avatar was an ancient spirit. When its bearer's eyes glowed and it spoke with a thousand voices everyone could feel that in their bones. It had the knowledge of a thousand lives, and the power that came with that was incredible. Aang seemed so young and goofy, it felt so wrong for that power to come from him. But that power was him, in a way no one ever understood. It was him in every life he'd ever lived, united for a few moments in one body.

Aang thought himself so unlike the other Avatars. When he thought about it that was. He tried not to most of the time. Whether it was his failure to live up to them, or his horror at the actions they took and said he should take when he spoke to them. He never thought about himself as them. They seemed like different people, wise old masters, that's how he thought of them. But if someone were to know every one of them they would quickly see the resemblance.

He felt so unlike Kyoshi who could talk about murder unflinchingly. Yet anyone who knew them both would see her in his clumsy attempts to flirt when he was 12. Or the way he became best friends with an angry firebender, seeing past all the shouting. But the thing that truly united them was a feature that every one of their lives had. Kyoshi was kind, she forgave those who wronged her and did not do violence when she didn't have to. Indeed in this she and Aang were more alike than Avatar Tashi long before them, or Avatar Ling, or even Avatar Kuruk. Although Aang wouldn't have believed it. In every one of their lives, even when they were at their most aggressive like Avatar Chao they were still quick to forgive, slow to hate. And no matter what they always stepped up to help when someone needed it. Sometimes grudging, sometimes afraid, but always there. That was what made the legend of the Avatar, the bending was just how they knew it was them. 

~~~~~

Katara was an old soul. No one knew it, no one could. There was no way to track people's past lives. But Katara had had many and they were all her in a way Sokka or Aang would not have recognized but would have felt eerily out of place to see. Like seeing your father's reflection staring out of the mirror. Glimpsing your long dead mother in your peripheral vision only to turn and find your baby sister standing there. 

They'd have recognized her in the laugh of a little earth kingdom boy, an old beggar woman, a drunken lumberjack. In the kind smile of a smug monk, a limping earthbender, a wealthy merchant. In the righteous fury of an avenging firebender, a furious toddler, a grieving mother. 

She had been so many people that it would be hard to argue they all shared one thing in common, each one different from the last. But if there was one thing that they most often had in common it was their nurturing. Not all of them wanted to be a parent, a caregiver, a kind smile and a gentle hand, and not all of them were good at it. But so often that was what they became. Whether they fell into the role trying all the while to escape it or spent their whole lives working towards it, it was where she had usually ended up, time and time again.

She had been a monk so desperate to take on a student and a nun so terrible at letting her children scatter to the winds. An eldest sibling who took on their fathers role with more grace than anyone expected of the little menace, and an only child of only child nobles who had no idea where their daughter had gotten it into her head to have seventeen children, she didn't even like the other nobles children. 

She was old, and she was nurturing, but she wasn't exceptional. There were hundreds just like her. Being exceptional in a past life was never what it took. What it did take was being in the right place at the right time. She hadn't been brave in every life but in this one she was. She was brave, and nurturing and furious, and that was all she needed to be.

~~~~~

Sokka wasn't as old as his sister. He was really quite young in comparison. Not that either of them would ever know. Although if he had known he might have felt better about how much he let his little sister take care of him. He'd had hundreds of lives but not thousands. Perhaps that was why his lives shared the trait that they shared, their relative newness.

Not all of them were clever and quick witted and quicker learners like Sokka, most weren't. They weren't all mechanically minded or tactically gifted, or even particularly bright. But they all shared a way of looking at things from a different angle. Lu-shi hadn't been gifted in any particular respects, but he had been the one to think of turning rice to flour. Mayu hadn't been a particularly good guard or detective yet she'd cracked 3 separate cases thought to be unsolvable in her short career. Jinju was such a dunce his name became synonymous with messing something up among the other children. But whenever any of the other monks needed a different perspective on a problem they always knew to turn to him. 

He was a child who could come up with new rules for an old game. A teacher who could settle her children's arguments in ways no one else would ever think of, an artist who invented an entirely new movement. Most of the time this ingenuity didn't really help their lives, more often than not it made them stand out as odd. Often it was only there in the mildest respects. A father who realizes he should be getting up with the baby despite tradition, a glassmaker thinking to try out different temperatures even though it only ever ruins things, a cook who gets fired for ruining food with their experiments. But always that quality is there, the most recognizable throughline throughout hundreds of lives. Born with the intelligence to use it and nurtured by a like-minded father, in his life Sokka got to use it.

~~~~~

Toph had lived as many lives as the next person. All of them had been different. If you were to watch all of them you would see similarities. A smile shared between one life and the next. A look in the eyes that promised trouble. But they didn't have all that much in common. The resilience she showed wasn't a trait found in all her lives. Her determination not a spiritual constant. Even her sass and snark weren't consistent throughout her lives. 

What was special about Toph was something that was unique to her. Her strength and stubbornness weren't something she'd been born with. They were something she'd built up in herself. 

Her strength was from facing a world that thought her fragile and needing to prove it wrong. Her determination born of a desperation to be more than a hidden porcelain doll. Her resilience from falling down and getting back up over and over again. Her life had been easy in some respects, but it didn't give her what she needed and she never stopped fighting tooth and nail for it. For recognition, for a life her own, to be barefoot and covered in dirt the way she needed to be to feel like her skin was her own. Even her sass was born of that desire to prove herself more than what people thought. To protect herself from any appearance of vulnerability. She would not be porcelain and no one would ever see her crack.

Toph wasn't born with her stubbornness and determination. But every life she ever lived afterwards would feel deep inside them, the well of strength that came from the greatest earthbender who ever lived.

~~~~~

Zuko wasn't like the others. Zuko was new, as so few lives are. He has never lived before. Every lesson he learns he learns for the first time. It seems to take him so long to learn each thing for the first time. How to walk, how to talk, how to bend. He is a slow learner, or a fast one depending on how you look at it.

Some lessons take longer, some he never truly masters. How to tell truth from lies and lie in return. All the subtleties that come with games of half truths and ill intentions. For a long time he has the temper of a toddler. Quick to stamp his feet and yell and scream, quick to forget about it once it's out of his system, and never meaning any harm. He feels things so deeply and so openly, whether it's the way he tries to adopt every turtleduck or the way he can speak his feelings without a trace of irony or shame. It makes others embarrassed to look at him sometimes, to see him feeling so openly. It seems a terrible trait in a royal. It's also what saves the world.

Each feeling he feels for the first time with no past experiences to help temper the intensity, or help him understand what he's experienced. Someone older would at least suspect people who burn you don't love you, but he has so little to compare to, how could he know? 

And when at long last he makes friends? His smile is like the sun, he doesn't think to hide how deep his adoration is for the people who have, for the very first time, chosen to love him. 

If one were to know all this about Zuko a great many things would make sense. Yet they might ask the universe, why would you do this to him? Why would you put a brand new life in such a difficult start? 

If the universe would reply it might say that that's just what the world needed. Someone new. Someone who feels too deeply, who rages openly and melodramatically and smiles like the sun. Or it might not, maybe it didn't plan it at all. It does not answer so there's no way to know.

There is no way to know anything really, yet when you watch the Avatar, Aang, stand there beside Zuko on the day of his coronation, standing tall and young and strong together, facing the world they're determined to save, it can feel like destiny really did bring them to this moment.

~

And while Zuko may be the first life, he has countless more to go. And this one thing they all have in common: they never give up without a fight.

**Author's Note:**

> I could totally do more and am tempted to do another 5 characters or something, pretty much because I wanna do Azula. But knowing me I'll probably never do it. Feel free to post encouragment below and maybe I'll actually write my bby!Zuko kills Ozai AU I keep meaning to. I also take constructive criticism. Thanks for reading and hope you liked it either way


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